We need to challenge the punitive capitalist narrative that only certain categories of people deserve to be able to afford to eat and pay the rent

• Frances Ryan writes the Guardian’s Hardworking Britain series

An anti-cuts protest on 1 March 2017, outside parliament: ‘There is no need for nurses or teachers to struggle to pay the rent – and there is no need for a carer or single parent to, either.’
Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

As food and rent prices rise, the government ensures that the income of millions of families shrinks. Watch the Tories announce that they’ll hold down teachers’ pay for another year, and you could be forgiven for thinking this shameful state of affairs is simply an issue of the public sector pay freeze. In fact, it’s just as much the reality of another punitive austerity policy: the freeze on benefits.

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Just like the public sector pay freeze, the benefits freeze – which sees benefits capped rather than, as was standard, rise in line with wages – knowingly caps the money the state provides below the rate needed to pay for rent, food, and bills.

Due to run until 2020, the freeze hits many of the key working-age benefits, from child and housing benefit to employment support allowance (ESA) for disabled people too ill to work. It is as damaging as any cap on wages, and is widely recognised as a key driver behind forecasts of rising poverty to come.

The homeless charity Shelter warns that freezing housing benefit will force families to find hundreds of pounds extra every month to avoid eviction, while the Children’s Society estimates that more than 7 million children from some of the country’s poorest households are affected – losing up to 12% from the real value of their benefits over the next four years.

Yet the public sector pay freeze dominates the headlines, even inspiring Conservative revolt, while there’s hardly a whisper about overturning the benefits freeze.

In some ways, this is understandable. For politicians it’s easy to sell the idea that nurses, teachers and police deserve a pay rise – and not just because it’s actually the right thing to do. Rather, it evokes the same comforting sense of “deserving” workers, which propped up George Osborne’s “hardworking families” agenda for so long: in the toughest of economic times, when it is supposedly fair to abandon the unemployed or disabled, “hardworking” people should be taken care of.

That nurses and teachers are the people propping up our vital public services – particularly at a time of stripped NHS and school budgets – makes this even starker. Indeed, as the Department for Education (DfE) put it in Tuesday’s announcement robbing school staff of a pay rise: “We recognise and value the hard work of teachers.”

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That’s something the DfE should recognise – but it should “recognise” it with a decent pay packet rather than rhetoric. At the same time, we need to challenge the idea that only certain categories of people deserve to be able to eat and pay the rent. We need to question a political climate that implies that the hardship of people on frozen wages matters more than the hardship of people on frozen benefits – as if a nurse going to a food bank is somehow more horrendous than a wheelchair user going hungry because their out-of-work sickness benefit is capped.

This isn’t simply an issue of years of “benefit scrounger” narrative. It’s a symptom of the capitalist belief that a person’s contribution to society can be judged by their use in the labour market. This shuts out entire sections of society: the people who, owing to caring responsibilities, lack of opportunities or health problems, can’t earn a wage.

This attitude is ingrained so deeply that anyone who questions it is deemed to be “radical left” or “fiscally irresponsible”. While even pro-austerity politicians feign concern over the pay freeze for nurses and teachers, somehow a carer looking after her husband with Parkinson’s, who is so poor she needs benefits to get by, is hardly worth a thought. Odds on, the same people abandoned to the benefit freeze are already being hit by, say, the bedroom tax, child tax credit changes or ESA cuts – and that smacks of political bullying.

Let’s grab the chance to point to the low-paid parents, carers and disabled people who are also suffering

This issue is only going to get more pressing. As of last month, families are in the grip of the most protracted squeeze on living standards since the economic crisis of the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the benefits freeze is becoming crueller than even the Tories imagined: research from the House of Commons library shows that, because of inflation, the cap is cutting people’s support by almost 50% more than official estimates.

While Theresa May desperately claims that reducing austerity measures would take Britain into a “Greece-style” crash, the public is becoming more and more aware of how unnecessary austerity is. In one of the richest nations on earth, there is no need for nurses or teachers to struggle to pay the rent – and there is no need for a carer or single parent to, either.

It’s time to push for public sector workers to finally be liberated from their crippling pay freeze. But let’s not stop there: in the same breath as talking about struggling nurses and teachers, let’s grab the chance to point to the low-paid parents, carers and disabled people who are also suffering.

This is not radical. This is common sense and decency: so-called benefit claimants deserve to have enough money to live on.